Day 180 — June 29th 2021
The Green Death Episodes Five and Six
The Green Death — Episode Five
‘There’s more going on here than I thought,’ says Doctor Who at one point in this episode. Unfortunately, the more that gets added into the story, the less interest I have in proceedings. This episode spends a fair amount of time on the confrontation between Doctor Who and BOSS, and I have to confess that I wasn’t all the fussed on it. John Dearth gives a decent enough performance in the role, but try as they might the dialogue between him and Jon Pertwee never quite feels natural. It has the curious effect of Pertwee always waiting for a cue — as though BOSS’ part were being read in later, which I’m sure wasn’t actually the case.
All the talk about the computer being more advanced than biological life, and having flaws programmed in which help it to be more advanced just didn’t grab me — I think I’d have preferred to go without this strand of the narrative and instead focus just on the chemical waste causing trouble in the mine. The series over the last few years has taken a pretty grim view on the thing humanity does to the planet, and I’d have rather had the bad guys here simply be greedy and uncaring.
It’s telling, I think, that the parts of the episode which worked the best for me were the ones out on the slag heap, when we’re dealing with the maggots and UNIT’s attempts to defeat them. And yet even here I’ll confess that my interest has started to wear a little thin.
This is Michael Briant’s third outing as a Doctor Who director, but it’s sadly missing a lot of the dynamic energy he showcased in his previous stories. There was a brief attempt to do some Dutch angles again earlier in the story but they’re not as effective as when used in The Sea Devils. And this episode makes some… unusual choices when it comes to the location work.
Several of the scenes with UNIT out fighting the maggots alternate between being shot on location and being done in the studio, with the actors stood around on a yellow (or blue, in some cases) screen and being dropped into a photograph taken on location. I don’t know if they simply ran out of time on location to shoot everything they wanted to capture, or if it was a conscious choice to try something different, but it’s jarring either way. It’s especially frustrating when you switch between formats for almost identical set ups featuring the same characters.
There’s also an attempt to get some aerial shots of Doctor Who driving Bessie across the slag heap, dodging maggots as he goes… but it’s done with a model! Robot gets a lot of stick for the toy army tank, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen people calling out this one for the slightly dodgy corgi version of Bessie, with the two little plasticine figures in the seats. It’s frustrating when you compare it to stories like The Enemy of the World, where they made the most of having a helicopter on location (as indeed they do here) to get some great shots of the location.
I’ve one last whinge about the direction in this episode, and it’s all to do with the reveal of Mike Yates having been turned to the ‘dark side’ by BOSS. It’s a great moment — made all the better by the fact that I wasn’t expecting it — with some brilliant dialogue;
Yates: ‘They let me go.’
Doctor Who: ‘But why?’
Yates: ‘To kill you.’
But the whole sequence is directed so flatly as to rob it of pretty much any and all tension. We don’t even have the camera on Mike properly when he makes the reveal! It feels like this should have been a really big moment, a tentpole for the whole episode, but the impact is totally diluted. We’ll get a similar sequence in a few days time, and I’ll be keeping an eye on that for something hopefully a bit more dramatic…!
I’ve agonised a bit over the score for this one, but I think I’ve settled on a 5/10, which is a disappointing slip for a story that had been doing rather well. Fingers crossed it can pull it all back together for the final instalment…
The Green Death — Episode Six
Almost fifteen years ago I was working in a shop which specialised in Doctor Who merchandise. The revived series was at the peak of its popularity, with David Tennant having recently finished his second season, and one of the highlights of the job was occasional signing events with actors from Old Testament Doctor Who. One of the first people who came up to Norwich for us was the always lovely Katy Manning.
Of course she was a hit with all the people who’d come out to see her on a wet Saturday afternoon. I’ve run into Katy at several conventions over the years and have always been impressed by just how well she’s able to make the person she’s speaking to feel like the only person in the world who matters to her in that moment. She’s a genuine ray of sunshine.
Anyway, about half past twelve a man slipped into the shop and approached the counter. He asked us if we’d be able to spare Katy for an hour or so for lunch. He didn’t realise that she was going to be here, he explained, and happened to be in the city that day and spotted the poster in the window. I was a bit cautious — a strange man wanting to take our guest out for a ‘surprise lunch’? My colleague on the other hand jumped in and said it wouldn’t be a problem. He had the man come through to the back to wait while Katy got through the couple of people she was then speaking to.
‘That,’ my colleague explained in response to my baffled expression, ‘is Professor Jones!’. I’d not seen The Green Death at that point, so it meant nothing to me. When Katy saw that Stuart Bevan was there to see her it was magical. They hugged and laughed and headed out for lunch. I quite shyly plucked a copy of this story’s DVD off the shelf and asked them both to sign it on their return.
Over the years Manning has suggested that she doesn’t think Cliff and Jo’s marriage would have lasted, and there’s a tongue in cheek special feature on the Blu-ray — Global Conspiracy — which takes this stance too. But I much prefer the version of events presented by The Sarah Jane Adventures; that Jo and Cliff did work out and are still fighting for the good of the planet all these decades later. Oh sure, he’s a bit of a dick to her at times in this story, but I think Jo would soon sort that out. It’s just too tempting to want to think of the characters being as pleased to see each other as the actors were on that afternoon.
I think to do anything other than have the pair still together would be doing a disservice to the rather lovely ending of this story. Those closing scenes in which Cliff proposes to Jo and Doctor Who makes his silent farewell are so beautifully done — I think they might well be the most emotional scenes the programme has given us so far. They’re certainly the first time we’ve done emotion like this in the 1970s, and really since the Hartnell era.
‘Don’t go too far away, will you? And if you do, come back and see us sometime’ says Jo towards the end, and it’s sad that she never gets to make a return in the Old Testament (mention in Planet of the Spiders aside). If this were the ‘new’ series we’d see Jo pop up again with Cliff in tow to help out Doctor Who in the next season. It’s not really the kind of thing the old show does, but I think if any character could get away with it, it’s Jo.
It feels so strange to think of the programme without her — she’s been such a defining force over the last three seasons, and I’m really pleased she’s been given such a solid departure.
As for the rest of the episode… oh, I really want to like it. The idea of the computer humming Wagner to itself as the moment of victory approaches is very funny, and such a brilliantly Doctor Who idea, but it feels totally out of place to me. It’s the sort of thing I can imagine Douglas Adams, or Robert Holmes, making work in a comical way, but here it sort of comes from nowhere. BOSS has been set up as a sinister and powerful force in the early episodes, and then is almost immediately a very different character in this final instalment.
Give me a line about him taking on more of Stevens’ human characteristics while the man becomes ever more like a computer and I could buy it, but you sort of need the set up for that. If we’d heard Stevens listening to some Wagner in his office in Episode One you’d really feel the flip of the characters here, but sadly it’s not to be. A real shame.
I’m also not entirely sure what I make of the fly in this episode. There’s a point where Doctor Who spells out the threat they’re facing if the maggots complete their lifecycle and evolve, which sounds genuinely scary;
Doctor Who: ‘We must find an answer to those maggots before they pupate. Imagine, thousands of flying insects spreading their infection throughout the world.’
The Brigadier: ‘I’d rather not, thank you.’
But in practice we get a single fly which looks fairly Papier-mâché being defeated after about a minute when Doctor Who throws his coat over it! Maybe this is an occasion where some updated effects may have helped? It stands out as quite poor because it’s shown alongside some gorgeous film close ups of the maggots — there’s one shot used a couple of times as a maggot hisses and it’s proper scary. Definitely the kind of thing kids might have had nightmares about.
Overall I think I’m going with a 6/10 — there’s so much potential but it never quite comes through.
